Hazard Mitigation Planning

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Mitigation Plans form the foundation for a community's long-term strategy to reduce disaster losses and break the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage. The planning process is as important as the plan itself. It creates a framework for risk-based decision making to reduce damages to lives, property, and the economy from future disasters. Hazard mitigation is sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate long-term risk to people and their property from hazards.

Hazard mitigation planning reduces the risk to people and property, and reduces the cost of recovering from a disaster. A hazard mitigation plan can help communities become more sustainable and disaster-resistant by focusing efforts on the hazards, disaster-prone areas and identifying appropriate mitigation actions. Effective mitigation planning and efforts can break the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage.

Take a look at these videos from FEMA about Hazard Mitigation Planning.

New Guiding Principles and Intent statements support regulatory requirements; and

New Plan Review Tool to replace the existing Crosswalk in a simplified format and communicate implementation of the plan as well as improvements to the plan.

Implementation will be phased over the course of a year and the Local Mitigation Plan Review Guide will become effective on October 1, 2012 to allow stakeholders at the State and local level to prepare for the change.

The Local Mitigation Planning Handbook is the official guide for local governments to develop, update and implement local mitigation plans. While the requirements under §201.6 have not changed, the Handbook provides guidance to local governments on developing or updating hazard mitigation plans to meet the requirements under the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 44 – Emergency Management and Assistance §201.6, Local Mitigation Plans for FEMA approval and eligibility to apply for FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance grant programs.

It also offers practical approaches, tools, worksheets and local mitigation planning examples for how communities can engage in effective planning to reduce long-term risk from natural hazards and disasters. The Handbook complements and liberally references the Local Mitigation Plan Review Guide , which is the official guidance for Federal and State officials responsible for reviewing local mitigation plans in a fair and consistent manner.

Mitigation Planning Training

Individuals interested in learning more about the hazard mitigation planning process and how to write and maintain their own plan can take FEMA’s online training course IS-318, Mitigation Planning for Local and Tribal Communities. This course is free of charge and offered by FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute.

This online training course along with video training provided through the links below, covers the fundamentals of the mitigation planning requirements for communities to develop new or updated Mitigation Plans that address community priorities and needs and meet requirements established in 44 CFR 201.6.

Online Training:

Other Resources:

"Beyond the Basics" Website Shares Best Practices in Local Mitigation PlanningThe "Beyond the Basics" website is the product of a five-year research study conducted by the Coastal Hazards Center and the Center for Sustainable Community Design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). As part of this study, researchers at UNC systematically analyzed 175 local hazard mitigation plans drawn from six states to assess their content and quality. Each plan was evaluated using a hazard mitigation plan quality protocol that has been developed, tested and applied over several projects across the country.

The website is designed to help guide the user through the process of developing or updating a local hazard mitigation plan that will meet the requirements for approval by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).